Three Steps To Complete Reset Behavior Verification


By Chris Kwok, Priya Viswanathan, and Ping Yeung Reset architectures are notoriously complex and difficult to verify. Today’s SoCs contain highly complex reset distributions and synchronization circuitry. Often, reset trees can be larger than clock trees and have many of the same potential issues. Verifying that a design can be correctly reset under all modes of operation presents signi... » read more

Seeing Is Believing: Visualizing Full Coverage Closure In Low-Power Designs


By Madhur Bhargava and Durgesh Prasad Lowering the power consumption and leakage in SoCs and other electrical designs has become a paramount concern in recent years. The reasons for this are many and well understood. The structures and techniques we use to accomplish this have made verification of so called low-power designs more complex and difficult than it is for designs where power usage... » read more

Place And Route Made Easier And Faster


By Allan Crone A predictable trend in IC design is the ever-increasing size and complexity of designs while keeping the time allocated for the projects the same or shorter. Along with the tape-out pressure, organizations need to find cost savings everywhere possible. Lowering the overall cost of ownership of EDA tools is a viable way to manage the design budget. Consequently, design teams ar... » read more

Writing Reusable UPF For RTL And Gate-Level Low Power Verification


By Durgesh Prasad, Jitesh Bansal and Madhur Bhargava The Unified Power Format (UPF) is used to specify the power intent of a design. Once written, the UPF file is applied at every stage of the design cycle — starting with the RTL, then the gate-level, and finally during place and route. A major problem is that the UPF needs to be refined or modified at every stage to keep it compatible ... » read more

Empowering UPF Commands With Effective Elements Lists


The Unified Power Format (UPF) is intended for power management, power aware verification, and low power implementation. The more we explore the inherent features of UPF commands and options, and comprehend their interrelation, the more we become accurate, productive, and consistent in developing UPF for our intended purposes. Although the UPF is very well defined through the IEEE 1801 LRM, ... » read more

Speed Up P2P Resistance Debugging With Selective Highlighting


Point-to-point (P2P) resistance simulation calculates the effective parasitic resistance from one or more specified points (sources) to another set of points (sinks) on an integrated circuit (IC) layout. The results of these simulations are a key component in the verification of the robustness and reliability of IC layout interconnect—designers must have this information to accurately perform... » read more

ASIC/IC Trends With A Focus On Factors Of Silicon Success


“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” ― Aristotle, 4th C. BC When Aristotle uttered this humble aphorism, he wasn’t telling us to throw up our hands and not bother with learning. He was encouraging us to continue digging deeper, to get answers and ask questions of those answers — that the thrills and rewards of study are truly without end. This is a big part of ou... » read more

The Weather Report: 2018 Study On IC/ASIC Verification Trends


Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan observed, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Similarly, we can get a feeling for where our industry is going by attending to the flow of thought at conferences, on line, or in our daily business. But that gives us only a small window to observe the hurricane-like forces of the very large and complicated, extremely dynamic global semico... » read more

Trends In FPGA Verification Effort And Adoption: The 2018 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study


As contributors and pioneers in the digital revolution, we are often so busy creating and innovating that we are compelled to focus on the trees, never mind the forest. But as we are all aware, the more we know about the bigger picture, context, historical and projected trends, or simply how other people are doing the same thing, the more efficiently and successfully we can do our jobs. Prov... » read more

Automated Analog Design Constraint Checking


By Hossam Sarhan and Alexandre Arriordaz Overview Analog integrated circuits (ICs) are used to control and regulate conditions such as temperature, speed, sound, and electrical current. In analog ICs, voltage and current vary continuously at specified points in the circuit. One of the biggest challenges in analog integrated circuit (IC) design is to achieve and maintain accurate ratios: cap... » read more

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